Religious Anthroplogy

Religious Anthroplogy

The Theory of Evolution and the Exalted Man

Document Type : Research Paper

Author
Assitant Professor of Islamic Theology in Research Centre for Culture and Islamic Thought
10.22034/ra.2019.62377.1936
Abstract
Biology has left the greatest effectson human sciences including religious and non-religious ones by way of the theory of evolution.  Lamarckism, Darwinism, Neo-Darwinism and those believe in genetic evolution such as Dawkins exhibit the turning points and progressing line of this theory. Lamarckism was abolished by biologists themselves. Some scientific and non scientific factors, however, caused Darwinism to survive in scientific communities, in spite of the oppositions by some biologists and its inherent deficiencies.  The ambiguty of this theory concerning the first stage of life and attributing some changes to chance and presenting a wild behavioral model on the basis of struggle for life as well as the breach of the law even in the case of animals, are among deficiencies of this theory. Today, thanks to considerable developments in genetics, the same evolutionary belief in the form of genetic changes and mutations has been put forward by some scholars such as Dawkins. The present study, in addition to presenting a general criticism of the theory and of its inclusion of Man, has investigated the relation of the theory with the exalted position of Man in life and concluded that the theory, given its correctness, is compatible with this exalted position of Man.
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